Victorian
Corsets: Laces, Hooks, and Boa Constrictors

copyright 1997 by Lady Melisande of Hali

Helping Hand

One always reads about and sees pictures of women being laced
into corsets, but this was much less common than you might think.

Every corset had fitting laces up the back, but also most had
hooks and eyes running up the front. Most women put on a new corset,
got someone else to lace it to fit perfectly but comfortably,
and thereafter got in and out by the hooks in front.

Now, the extremely fashionable, wanting to skim off every eighth-inch
and having maids with nothing better to do, did lace and unlace.
They wrapped the corset around the torso, hooked it closed, then
the maid (sometimes husband or lover) pulled every bit of slack
out of the laces. The corset was so tight that the hooks strained
at the eyes, and the lacing was best loosened before these could
be moved to unhook.

So you do not step in and out of a corset: you wrap it around
yourself like a belt. Also, if necessary, a woman can very well
get in and out of one unassisted. The knot on the laces is at
the bottom of the corset in back. The woman need only be able
to reach around to her tail bone and pick the knot open, then
pull a few crosses loose. Alternately, a corset may have one lace
from top down to waist, with a second lace below that, but the
knots are still all in reach. The difficult part of undressing
solo is not the corset but the zillion little buttons up the back
of the dress, such as survive on wedding dresses.

The charming and scholarly Janet Burgess is a superb provider
of books, shoes, hats, patterns, and dress goods to re-enactors
and costumers. She also can't resist using her catalog for Amazon
Dry Goods as a forum, as we use this web page. She has dug out
reliable evidence that those claimed Victorian 18-inch waists
were often much larger.

Young women of the period had a penchant for exaggerating the
small size of their corsets, as some do about jeans nowadays.
Like jeans, corsets were sold in sizes: 18, 20, 22, etc. You must
remember also how short people often were: Queen Victoria was
only four foot tall! Such relative midgets might have an 18-inch
waist at sometime in their youth.

Jeans have to be zipped (but you don't have to sit down or
eat in them). Corsets, on the other hand, can be laced with more
or less space between the edges. So if she left a four-inch space,
a girl with a 22-inch waist could boast that she wore "an
18-inch corset." Indeed, it seems a six-inch gap was commoner,
up to about eight inches.

Lest you inflate waistlines too much, we would like to add
the story of a twenty-year-old woman of our acquaintance, 5'2",
who would be tall for a Victorian woman, a decent height for many
a Victorian man. She had a 24-inch waist by nature, and had never
worn a corset or girdle in her life (nor was she anorexic or even
given to dieting, nor a smoker or other drug-user, and only got
C's in Phys. Ed. -- she just stayed constantly busy and grabbed
a hot-fudge sundae whenever she felt like it). At 18, the coming-out
age for many 19th century lasses, she remembers she had worn nearly
a size smaller clothes, which would have made her waist about
22 inches. So with effort, she might have been much narrower in
the waist. Many Victorian finishing schools not only ensured a
course of constantly increased tight-lacing for their lucky students,
they also kept them on very short rations so that they would not
grow unattractively big and robust. With smaller young women,
they might have managed an actual 18-inch waist. Such schools
also had a certain number of deaths due to "illness"
every year: everything was compounded by malnutrition and damage
to internal organs from compression.

Photos can lie -- retouching was invented early -- so look
very closely at any in which the waist too nearly approaches the
neck in size. You will almost always find illogical folds and
gathers at the top of the skirt, indicating the real waist was
notably larger.

First Hand

Corsets are an extraordinary experience the first time. You
hold your breath while someone straps you in, or maybe you let
it out to compress your rib cage. Your buddy says, "All done,"
and suddenly you have to figure out how to breathe, because all
your breathing gear has been immobilized. Tales of being suffocated
by a boa constrictor race into your mind.

Victorian doctors and anatomists claimed the difference between
men and women was so great that they even breathed differently:
men with the abdomen (as you probably are right now), women with
the thorax. That, and all the "heaving bosoms" in literature
are your clue to survival. You inflate your lungs by lifting and
lowering your sternum.

You practice this, and now that you have air you report it
to your friends who are along for this experiment. Then you want
to see the difference it makes in your figure, and run upstairs
at your usual lope to use the full-length mirror.

And just about pass out at the top.

Not all those swooning damsels were faking!

There is a distinct limit to how much air you can gulp in a
minute wearing a full corset. Any real exertion in very tight
lacing may take you past the oxygen limit. Late Victorian athletic
corsets often had elastic panels, so that while your flesh stayed
compressed, you could get a little rib action for deeper breaths.

Years of corsetting resulted in the muscles of the torso literally
atrophying. The claim that a woman could not stand upright for
more than a few minutes without a corset was cruelly true: a woman
who had always worn a corset could not. And these corsetted ladies
were the only women worthy of the name and of study, to Victorians.
Remember this if you have a character who decides to follow dress
reform. Many dress reformers (who had gone through the process
themselves) advised getting an athletic corset, and then removing
the bones or steels one by one, every couple of weeks, allowing
the muscles to develop before finally abandoning the cloth compression
months later.

So be kind to Victorian heroines in your thoughts. If they
are frail and fainting, incapable of physical exertion, they have
been made so since childhood by the demands of their society.
Give a couple of extra points to the ones who did manage to be
athletic in their corsets, too.